Netherlight Crucible Clarifications

Following confusion over the Netherlight Crucible at the Patch 7.3 Q&A, Blizzard has provided some clarifications.\r\rIt appears the confusion has stemmed from UI revamps over several builds--for example, the first build had multiple ranks listed for each tier, and these tiers should not have ranks. In addition, several builds did not display the Artifact Levels at which your relic tiers unlocked.\r\rThis is an early news preview based on PTR testing. For our definitive Netherlight Crucible guide and links to Crucible recommendations for all specs, please visit this link instead.\r\rThis is how the system currently works:\rThe first tier of Crucible traits increases the item level of your artifact.\rThe second row unlocks at Artifact level 60, 63, and 66. You can choose between a randomly-generated Light and Shadow ability. There are no ranks to these abilities, although the early in-game UI showed ranks.\rThe third row unlocks at Artifact level 69, 72, and 75. You can choose between one of three randomly-generated minor traits for your artifact. You'll have to pick a minor trait that connects to your second row trait. So if you pick the left Tier 2 trait, you can only pick the connected left or middle Tier 3 trait, not the right Tier 3 trait.\rThe minor traits cannot double up with the usual trait on your relic.\rThe second and third row ability options are randomly chosen at the time of socketing, or previewing, your relic.\r \r\rHey guys!\r\rSo, after yesterday's Q&A, it's become apparent that there's still some confusion about the Netherlight Crucible and how it works. We've been keeping an eye on your discussions about the topic, and wanted to give some explanations where we can, as well as open up a thread for any additional questions you may have.\r\rQ: How do the Relic "talents" unlock?\r\rA: As your Artifact increases in level (by spending Artifact Power), your Relic slots will level up as well. When you first unlock the Crucible, you'll have access to the first additional trait (a +5 increase to your Artifact's item level) in each slot. The second row unlocks at Artifact level 60, 63, and 66 (for the left, center, and right Relic slots respectively), and the third and final row unlocks at Artifact level 69, 72, and 75. This should all be pretty apparent when you look at those slots in-game, but may not be showing clearly via datamined info.\r\rQ: What did you mean by "it can't double roll a trait"?\r\rA: Just that you will never be able to upgrade a Relic to increase the same Artifact trait twice. If your Relic already has a bonus rank of Wrath of the Ashbringer on it, that trait will not be one of the three options presented in the bottom row of the Crucible's upgrade tree.\r\rIn other words, there's no risk of having your Wrath of the Ashbringer relic be "ruined" by not rolling a second bonus to Wrath of the Ashbringer, because that could never have happened in the first place. However, if you get a relic without Wrath of the Ashbringer, there's now a chance that it'll gain it from the Crucible.\r\rAdditionally, those three options will always be unique; it won't, for example, give you the "choice" between Deflection, Deflection, or Deflection. Aside from making sure you always have options, this means that your odds of having your favorite trait appear on a Relic you'd otherwise have discarded are actually pretty decent.\r\rQ: How do the ranks for the first two rows work?\r\rA: There are no such ranks. We think this is coming from some confusion about how the Netherlight Crucible is showing up in datamining, versus how it actually operates in-game. Once you've unlocked a row in the Crucible, you just select the option you like, and that's it - there's no additional leveling up of those options beyond that.\r\rFor those peeking into the data (or anyone else who might be curious): this is because of how we built the system to allow the unlockable effects to stack between each relic. It's just a subtle behind-the-scenes optimization on our end.\r\rHopefully that will help clear the air about how the Netherlight Crucible works, but we're sure you have more questions, so ask away and we'll do our best to answer what we can! We'll aim to provide an update sometime next week. Thanks!\rTLDR:\r\rBefore the patch, if you get a relic that doesn't have the trait you want, you throw it away.\r\rAfter the patch, if you get a relic that doesn't have the trait you want, you can plug it into the Netherlight Crucible and maybe get it anyway.\r\rThat's about all there is to it!\r

Commentaires

Commentaire de Chaxton

on 2017-08-04T22:40:38-05:00

Personally, I could do without the crucible, since there's plenty of content padding already. It's a shame this will be yet another artificial "requirement" for raiding like having the correct legendaries and having Concordance.

Commentaire de sinangelus

on 2017-08-04T22:51:54-05:00

Yep, enjoy grinding mandatory rank 75 to unlock all parts of the crucible before Antorus opens. And knowing how the AK works, you'll have to do it in the last week before the raid opens. Hope you saved some days off from your workplace!

Commentaire de pilot3931

on 2017-08-04T23:22:05-05:00

Gap between relics will be increased. Smth like high-ilvl relic with 2 bad traits vs low-ilvl relic with 2 good traits where ilvl diff about 25-30 relics ilvl.

Commentaire de Daillemand

on 2017-08-05T00:09:33-05:00

Yep, enjoy grinding mandatory rank 75 to unlock all parts of the crucible before Antorus opens. And knowing how the AK works, you'll have to do it in the last week before the raid opens. Hope you saved some days off from your workplace!\r\rEasy with AK 41+ to grind it.

Commentaire de Jimbrooks

on 2017-08-05T00:11:00-05:00

I thought they were going away from complex systems. So I have to effectively look at every relic regardless of ilvl and base trait and see if it has desirable crucible traits? How exactly are we to know without socketing it in the first place...that's a pretty big gamble right? I could have a so-so relic in my weapon I am playing the rng game to whether or not the relic I got from doing a dungeon is better or worse regardless of ilvl and base trait? Bleh this is going to be annoying not able to see what crucible abilities they have just from previewing. It would be awful if we have to socket it to actually see.

Commentaire de delindsay

on 2017-08-05T00:30:43-05:00

Yep, enjoy grinding mandatory rank 75 to unlock all parts of the crucible before Antorus opens. And knowing how the AK works, you'll have to do it in the last week before the raid opens. Hope you saved some days off from your workplace!\r\rEasy with AK 41+ to grind it.I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess you have no idea how much AP it takes at R70+

Commentaire de Rilgon

on 2017-08-05T01:22:16-05:00

"The second and third row ability options are randomly chosen at the time of socketing, or previewing, your relic."\r\rSo &*!@ you if you get bad options when you got a great titanforged relic, loot it again, sucker!\r\rWho the hell thought this was a good idea and why do they still have a job?

Commentaire de Mmi257ia

on 2017-08-05T01:46:02-05:00

Another random. If now we have to farm relic with great ilvl and perk, in 7.3 we`ll have to farm relic with ilvl, perk AND great upgrades in NLC.\r\rCommunity all Legion says that random isn`t fun, but Blizzards add another. Thanks, blizzs! (no)

Commentaire de CornbreadPops

on 2017-08-05T01:59:49-05:00

I thought they were going away from complex systems. So I have to effectively look at every relic regardless of ilvl and base trait and see if it has desirable crucible traits? How exactly are we to know without socketing it in the first place...that's a pretty big gamble right? I could have a so-so relic in my weapon I am playing the rng game to whether or not the relic I got from doing a dungeon is better or worse regardless of ilvl and base trait? Bleh this is going to be annoying not able to see what crucible abilities they have just from previewing. It would be awful if we have to socket it to actually see.\r\rThe crucible has a preview slot so you can see.

Commentaire de Khiman

on 2017-08-05T02:02:50-05:00

Personally, I could do without the crucible, since there's plenty of content padding already. It's a shame this will be yet another artificial "requirement" for raiding like having the correct legendaries and having Concordance.

Getting concordance is pretty easy now, if you farm till you get 920+ ilvl no (required for raiding imo) you will have unlocked the concordance by then.Also note that they will increase the Artifact Knowledge level cap, so it will be even faster after the 7.3.

Commentaire de Gyrospark

on 2017-08-05T03:34:01-05:00

This is very troublesome.\r\r\rLoot a relic and then you have to go to the crucible to see what random traits you are going to get. If its good then okay, if not then you pass it on to someone else. This will waste ALOT of time in raids since every kill several players will have to go to the crucible to see their traits.\r\rUnless they make it so you can preview the crucible from your artifact.weapon, which is not the case as of the latest PTR build.

Commentaire de Jimbrooks

on 2017-08-05T03:47:43-05:00

\r\rThe crucible has a preview slot so you can see.\r\rOh that square on the right? While that's cool I think that we have to go there in the first place to preview it is a little backwards imo. It reminds me of reforging system where people would immediately go after a boss to fix their new peice of gear and get a warlock to summon them back, but in this system we won't know if that the relic is any good even with a desirable base trait until we get to the crucible. At least with reforging people could figure out if it is worth before loot is distributed. \r\rJust seems like a lot of timewasting and missed opportunity to figure out if it would be even an upgrade. If we could preview it before loot is distributed like maybe how we can see the base trait of relics (if we can use it) already that would solve the problem. But from what I read it will be different for everybody? What a strange and confusing concept.

Commentaire de baqqa

on 2017-08-05T04:34:38-05:00

More rng, well it was about time

Commentaire de Sonatras

on 2017-08-05T05:06:45-05:00

Yep, enjoy grinding mandatory rank 75 to unlock all parts of the crucible before Antorus opens. And knowing how the AK works, you'll have to do it in the last week before the raid opens. Hope you saved some days off from your workplace!

Easy with AK 41+ to grind it.

Nope, I wouldn't call it "easy". Let's say you can do 52'500 AP before AK every week, which is reasonable. That translates to around 300m an everage each day with our curent AK. You need 943'376'766'300 AP to reach 75 traits. Let's start with an empty weapon and even if you have 60 Traits now, that's not a huge difference

Week after PatchAK BonusAccumulated APDifference to 75

116000000%8.4 billion935 billion

220800000%19.3 billion924.1 Billion

327040000%33.5 billion909.9 Billion

435150000%52 billion891.4 Billion

545700000%76 billion867.4 Billion

659400000%107.1 billion836.2 Billion

777250000%147.7 billion795.7 Billion

8100400000%200.4 billion743.0 Billion

9130500000%268.9 billion674.5 Billion

10169650000%358.0 billion585.4 Billion

11220550000%473.8 billion469.6 Billion

12286750000%624.3 billion319.1 Billion

13372750000%820.0 billion123.4 Billion

14484600000%1'100 billion-131.1 Billion

So yeah, you need around 13 and a half week to get to 75 traits. Sure you could wait another week and farm it with AK55 and get it done within around 3 weeks.

I might add, that to me this is no problem at all. WoW is still an MMORPG and as such has some elements of grinding which is part of the genre. But I know there are other people around for which this is a big deal.

However the system as a whole is quite bad. While I don't mind the grind to 75 traits, the whole RNG aspect is really bad. On one hand Blizz likes us to be able to determine whether an Item is an Upgrade or not on the spot, but then they add this mess. It might not be able to get a trait double with one Relic, but people could still get bad (meaning defensive only) traits on Tier 3. And suddenly the Relic which is a +3 Item Level upgrade with a good primary Trait might become worse then the already socketed relic which has both a good primary and a good trait on Tier 3. This isn't that bad if the Relic is Personal Loot, but if it is looted in a guild raid, it might mean, that the Loot Master want to give it to the next guy, but what if he's offline because the raid is over? And so on... Giving Relics to Player might take a long time going into the last raid...

But there is an easy fix to it: they should let us change the Tier 3 Traits. At a price of course. As an example, let it cost 100 billion AP to change a trait. That's a really big deal in the first couple weeks and you really might not want to invest that much, but as soon as we are at AK55, it won't be a big deal at all.

Commentaire de DarkAviator

on 2017-08-05T05:40:51-05:00

The relic becomes untradeable once previewed, so there will be no "several people have to look what the relic shows for them in the crucible".\r\rThe whole system is a complete mess. At the moment I can at least have a list with the weapon level equivalent of a trait and see if something would be an upgrade or not. With the crucible, anything might or might not be an upgrade, you can't tell before previewing it. The discussions in the raid will be glorious ... I don't think our lootmaster will want to do his job after a few weeks.\rWhich gets me back to the impression, that they don't play their own game anymore. Do they still raid in a guild group with master loot enabled? When one gets presented something like the crucible, I don't believe they do.

Commentaire de Sonatras

on 2017-08-05T05:51:49-05:00

The relic becomes untradeable once previewed, so there will be no "several people have to look what the relic shows for them in the crucible".

Ah good, didn't realise that. So if I get a Relic which turns out to be worse than the one I have, I just sell it, instead of trading it. On one hand, that takes far less time, on the other I can't even help my guildies in that situation.

Commentaire de MaXiiczek

on 2017-08-05T05:53:00-05:00

The second row unlocks at Artifact level 60, 63, and 66. \r\rOn the images there were 1 trait in first row, 2 traits on second row and 3 traits on third row... how does it work with second row unlocking on 3 different artifact levels while only having 2 traits? Or did something change?

Commentaire de Sonatras

on 2017-08-05T05:58:33-05:00

The second row unlocks at Artifact level 60, 63, and 66. \r\rOn the images there were 1 trait in first row, 2 traits on second row and 3 traits on third row... how does it work with second row unlocking on 3 different artifact levels while only having 2 traits? Or did something change?\r\rWith Artifact Level 60, you can unlock one of the two options on the second row of the first Relic.\rWith Artifact Level 63, you can unlock one of the two options on the second row of the second Relic.\rWith Artifact Level 63, you can unlock one of the two options on the second row of the third Relic.\r\rYou only unlock one of the two options every time, but you can choose which.

Commentaire de iceman994

on 2017-08-05T06:41:24-05:00

Personally, I could do without the crucible, since there's plenty of content padding already. It's a shame this will be yet another artificial "requirement" for raiding like having the correct legendaries and having Concordance.\r\rHaving the right trait too. Rng always ty Blizz

Commentaire de MaXiiczek

on 2017-08-05T07:33:02-05:00

\rYou only unlock one of the two options every time, but you can choose which.\r\rAh, understood now, thanks :)